(CNN) -- An Arizona prosecutor Friday asked to dismiss one of two murder charges against an 8-year-old boy suspected in the shooting deaths of his father and another man.Vincent Romero and Tim Romans were found dead in Romero's home in St. Johns, Arizona.

Apache County Attorney Criss Candelaria filed a one-paragraph motion in juvenile court to drop the murder charge accusing the boy of killing his father.

The motion gave no reason for the request, saying only that "the state believes the interest of justice will be served by such a dismissal."

We'll see what happens. Personally, I don't see anything so far which suggests to me this kid was abused. I mean, it's certainly a possibility, but I think it's unfair to the deceased to start making such allegations when they can't respond or defend themselves - there ARE such things as non-abused kids who have hurt or killed people before; and besides, at this point we're not even 100% certain this kid had anything to do with these killings at all.

Edited by melliferal (11/22/0811:31 AM)

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Children cannot consent; they can only comply.

A federal appeals court Thursday threw out the conviction of an Arizona man in the 1991 killings of nine worshipers at a Buddhist temple, ruling that police had coerced the then-17-year-old's confession by interrogating him for 12 hours without a lawyer or supportive adult present.

The decision could signal that Arizona authorities might face judicial censure for their treatment of an 8-year-old boy charged with two counts of murder earlier this month. The boy was subjected to interrogation with neither an attorney nor a relative at the videotaped session.

In the earlier case, Johnathan Doody was 17 when he was relentlessly questioned and was told that others had implicated him in the temple slayings, rendering the confession he gave "involuntary" and insufficient to sustain his murder conviction, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

_________________________"Being with people that understand you...Priceless"

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The police claim there isn't, however, they haven't actually interviewed the boy yet. They've only spoken to school officials and checked his medical records. The judge ordered that the boy be X-rayed to see if he has any broken bones. However, given that the prosecutors just dropped the charges against the boy for his father's death, chances are that something has been found.

_________________________
Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn/Every day I have to find the courage/To walk out into the street/With arms out/Got a love you can’t defeat/Neither down nor out/There’s nothing you have that I need/I can breathe/Breathe now - U2

"But later on the tape he said he shot his already wounded father "because he was suffering.""

the way he was saying suffering in the video was somehow strange, like it had a hidden meaning, the first thought that popped into my mind was he was using the word suffering as the only way that he knew how to describe (if indeed his father was abusing him) his fathers mental ilness. Sure the context apparently was that he shot him once and he didn't quite die, but since the video isn't continuous i cant be sure. But then i realised what it was, a boy that age would more likely use a simpler word such as hurting, but the boy used to go hunting with his dad all the time, and i bet his father had had to finish animals off before because they were "suffering", so it is a borrowed word, and that strange sound in his voice may indeed be because the context of the word in his mind comes from hunting, and maybe he did this with more awareness for whatever reasons than i would have previously thought.

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"...until lambs become lions"

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Hmmm. Not sure. I had no concept of the notion of "mental illness", or that people who succumb to it are "suffering", when I was 8 years old. I thought abusive people were mean or crazy, but even in the latter case my world was very black-and-white - bad people were bad, and that was it. I could see perhaps a much older teen doing it, but using "my father was suffering" as an abstract metaphor for "my father was abusing me" involves some redefinition and reworking of concepts that are themselves already beyond the intellectual capacity of an 8-year-old, in my opinion - they just don't think like that. If he thought what his father was doing to him was so bad that the only alternative was to kill him, I'm sure he would've found some way to say so more directly.

Allow me to offer my interpretation of the suffering comment. If we are to assume that it is a reference to a coup de grace, in a hunting situation, and if were are to assume that the boy's confession is genuine (i.e., he really was responsible for the shootings), then it seems to me it's very clearly simply an attempt at leniency. He obviously understands that killing people is wrong, because he lied to the cops at first, making up a whole story about finding the bodies, including such details as touching them, etc. When people are in a lying mindset, and are caught, their tendency is NOT to immediately start telling the truth, despite what many people seem to think. Their tendency is to lie again to make their first lie seem not so bad. Apparently the boy learned from his father while hunting that killing a wounded animal that is in pain is a morally good thing to do, so he added the "suffering" bit as a way of confessing, yet turning his confession into a proclamation of innocence - i.e., "Yes, I killed him, but it was a good thing to do, not a bad thing." THAT is something that's well within the intellectual capacity of an 8-year-old.

As an alternative, perhaps both of his stories are completely true. He said he had arrived home to find both of the men already shot. Then he said he shot his father, because the man was "suffering". I propose that both are factual - he found his father shot, but not dead; thus a coup de grace was a more direct corollary to hunting. That is also well within the capacity of an 8-year-old, as it doesn't involve connecting the physical pain of an animal from an obvious serious wound with the notion that mental illness comprises an invisible "wound" which would cause its host anguish and "suffering".

As for the dropped charge, I also don't think the prosecutor's office would ask to drop the charge based on a finding of evidence of abuse. They might reduce the charge to manslaughter because of it, or offer to reduce the charge in exchange for a guilty plea, but they would not just drop it. In fact, the only circumstances I can possibly think of that would cause them to simply drop the charge completely, would be either 1) finding direct evidence that the boy simply was not responsible for the fathers death - either the boy didn't shoot him at all, or the father was already dead when he did; or 2) gross negligence or violation of due process on the part of the agency that arrested and interrogated the boy, which the prosecutor thinks is blatant and bad enough to sink the case regardless of evidence. Both of these are certainly possible; however, given the recent public and quite vocal outcry from legal experts that the boy's interrogation was conducted wrongly (I think I remember hearing that the boy was not read his rights, or allowed a lawyer or parent to be present), I'm thinking that right now 2) is more likely.

_________________________
Children cannot consent; they can only comply.

"The boy hasn't been interviewed yet?" Where the hell have you been, buddy? It's all over the news, the net, and papers about the boy's interview. I watched the replay on AOL.

He was interviewed about the shootings, but not about whether he is a victim of abuse.

_________________________
Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn/Every day I have to find the courage/To walk out into the street/With arms out/Got a love you can’t defeat/Neither down nor out/There’s nothing you have that I need/I can breathe/Breathe now - U2

As for the dropped charge, I also don't think the prosecutor's office would ask to drop the charge based on a finding of evidence of abuse.

By something I meant counter-evidence, not that there was abuse. Reading what I wrote, I can see how you thought that.

I doubt that the prosecutors dropped the charge against the boy for the father's shooting based on the interrogation. The boy was forced to confess to both shootings, so if the interrogation is really a problem, then all charges should be dropped. The confession itself is not necessary if the prosecutors have evidence, which they claim to have. So the only remaining reason would be that they either have evidence that someone else committed the shootings, evidence that the boy's actions were mitigated or no evidence that the boy committed the shootings.

My guess is that it is either the first or the last. That would explain why they only dropped one charge against the boy, since the boy was interrogated and forced to confess only because the boarder's wife claimed she heard the boy call her husband downstairs. The greater question is why the wife did not come forward immediately (she waited until the funeral) and where the step-mother was during the shootings and why the police never bothered to ask anyone in the neighbor about a white car with back rimless tires.

_________________________
Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn/Every day I have to find the courage/To walk out into the street/With arms out/Got a love you can’t defeat/Neither down nor out/There’s nothing you have that I need/I can breathe/Breathe now - U2

Well the mother of the boy, says she was concerned about abuse and suspicious of the stepmother

From a NY times article

Whenever she spoke with her son, Ms. Bloomfield said, “I had to go through Tiffany,” a reference to his stepmother, Tiffany Romero. “Tiffany would always sit there while he talked to me on the phone, and after a while, he became more and more distant.”

She worried, she said, that the boy might be being abused although she had no proof.

Ms. Bloomfield said that after her son told her that his father and stepmother quarreled often, “I called Tiffany about that, and I think I got my son into trouble.”

“The next time I talked to him about it,” she added, “he said that Tiffany told him that ‘what happens in this house stays in this house.’ ”

_________________________"Being with people that understand you...Priceless"

"and i don't want the world to see me, cause i don't think that they'd understand"

"You don't know what love is...you just do as your told"

"My life has changed. What you take as a simple thing, is not so simple for me anymore"

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